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As they take office facing a $27 million projected budget shortfall, newly elected Portland city councilors are considering a vote to increase their staffing budget as one of their first orders of business.
Nearly all candidates for City Council expressed alarm last spring when the current council approved a budget that included enough funding for only one staffer for each city councilor. That staffer is called a senior council aide. (Each of the districts will have one shared scheduler, and the council at large will have several support staffers.)
The current City Council kept staffing low in attempt to rein in the costs of a council that voters expanded from five members to 12. The council did so against the recommendation of the city’s transition team. That team, which for two years has restructured the city to ready it for a new form of government, recommended that each councilor have two staffers apiece.
Loretta Smith, one of three councilors elected to represent District 1, has in recent onboarding meetings with city officials been the most vocal member of the incoming council about her desire to increase councilors’ staffing budgets. (She also managed to convince the transition team that incoming city councilors could hire more than one staffer, so long as they worked within their given budget.) But her colleagues across the other three districts have echoed her concern that the budget approved for each of the incoming city councilors doesn’t allow them to hire the staff necessary to fulfill their duties, according to four people close to the discussions.
To increase the staffing budget for council offices, the incoming City Council would have to approve an amendment to the city’s current budget.
The city says the staffing budget and model approved by the current City Council was “always envisioned as a starting point, which the new council can revisit once they take office,” says transition spokesman Daniel McArdle-Jaimes. “Beginning Jan. 1, they will have the budget authority to adjust staffing levels.”
But the appetite for increasing city councilors’ staff comes at a tricky financial time for the city, which says it faces a $27 million budget deficit next year. Mayor Ted Wheeler warned city bureaus this fall they would have to slash 5% to 8% from their budgets in the next fiscal year to fit within budget constraints.
The call for more council staff also comes as the city is in high-stakes contract negotiations with a number of labor unions. The primary point of contention is increased pay across various employee classifications. The city and several of the unions are currently in mediation. If mediation is unsuccessful, AFSCME Local 189, which represents over 1,000 city employees, has said it could go on strike as early as February.